Spotify for Android Update: Here’s What’s New

The Spotify update for Ice Cream Sandwich came out of preview today – get the update (0.5.0) from the Play store. It’s a huge improvement over the previous released version, so you’ll definitely want to upgrade (no matter what version of Android you use). I reviewed the preview version of this update already, so here’s a look at what’s changed since then.

Playlist Folders

The biggest new feature for me is Playlist Folders – finally on Android! These work just as you’d expect: click a folder name (which also tells you how many playlists the folder contains) to open the folder. You can use the back button as a way to navigate back through nested folders if you have folders-within-folders. You can’t create a folder (you do that with the desktop app) and the Downloaded section is still a flat list.

Playlist folders also have a handy "All Tracks" option to play all tracks in all playlists.

Home Screen Widget

The widget is back, now sporting a Spotify green go-faster stripe along the bottom. Functionally it’s the same as before, with the standard playback controls and album art icon.

Click the widget's album art to jump back into Spotify.

Last.fm Scrobbling

Scrobbling is back and works as expected: Last.fm reports each song as “Scrobbling from Spotify Mobile” as soon as a new song starts playing. Note that you need to press Enter when putting in your Last.fm password, otherwise it won’t be saved.

Crossfade and Gapless Playback Control

Also new is a crossfade feature as seen on the desktop and iPad app. This lets you set a crossfade between tracks of 0 – 12 seconds. My preference is to set this at around 7 seconds. Gapless playback was available in the preview, but this version now gives you the option to switch it off.

Play Queue

The Play Queue returns: click the bars top-right from the Now Playing screen to display it. This lists songs coming up in the queue (and shows album art for each track – nice!) but doesn’t show the queue’s history unfortunately.

After missing album art from the Android app for so long, it's now everywhere!

Other Tweaks

The currently-playing screen now displays the name of the playlist or album you’re listening to, which you can now click on to view the playlist/album. The Spotify icon in the notification area has had a bit of a monochrome makeover, and you’ll also see album art if you pull down the notification area while listening to something. “Under the hood” it seems more stable than the preview version: I’m glad to see I no longer have to kill the app several times a day to get it going again.

The notification area now shows album art.

Missing Features

This app has been completely rewritten to add a pile of new features, but inevitably some features from the old version didn’t make it. You don’t seem to be able to set the storage location, making your microSD cards useless for Spotify. There’s no Library any more, meaning that you can’t play all your songs at once (on shuffle or whatever). There doesn’t seem to be any local files option (unless you add them to a playlist on the desktop then “download” them on the Android app) and you can’t clear the download cache in-app any more. Oh, and there’s no Exit option or support for Landscape mode.

Conclusion

Based on the previous released version, this update is a huge improvement. It IS slicker and it IS faster. But since it’s a complete rewrite it does also introduce a few new glitches and problems. The bonkers design of duplicating all your downloaded playlists in a long flat list before you can get to your folders seriously reduces the app’s usability, and I’ve had more “Spotify is offline” errors today than I’ve ever seen before. But these are the kind of bug that should be easily fixed; all things as they are, I’m very pleased with this update!

Thanx for this! good tip about pressing enter after Last FM credentials. +1 on the bonkers remark about duplicating the downloaded playlists. So stupid!

http://pansentient.com/ Jer White

Thanks Simon, I’m hoping they tweak that Downloaded section to make it a collapsible folder or with a Settings checkbox to disable it.

Kilian

I like the Downloaded section. It is more convenient as I don’t usually stream over 3G.

http://www.mystorypage.com/ Giles

The flat downloaded folder hierarchy is a pain for me. I just posted this is the spotify forum but i’ll copy it here.

What I’m doing as a temporary (I hope) fix, is that I’ve created one huge root folder called ALL and dropped every folder into that. Because I download all my playlists everything in that folder is ready to play anyway.

Now I occasionally have to scroll way down to the bottom to get to this folder but generally I just don’t ever navigate out of it.
This has an added advantage that I can use the ALL folder to replace the lost ‘library’ functionality so I can suffle play all.

Giles

http://pansentient.com/ Jer White

Fair enough. I just think it’s a shame that it’s a flat organization that breaks (or at least makes it harder to get to) the folders.

About

The Pansentient League is a blog from Edinburgh-based writer Jer White (also known as Afront). It's mostly about music-streaming service Spotify, with a dose of synthpop music, Google Android, and the odd post or two about gadgets and science fiction.